By Jeremy Carr. Young Haya is having a rough time. At the beginning of the documentary Miss Kiet’s Children, this precocious primary school student is terribly upset. She fell on her way to school and her pants are dirty. She is sad and shameful. Her teacher, Kiet Engels, offers to give […]
Swimming in Poetry: The Shape of Water
December 14, 2017
By Elias Savada. When Guillermo del Toro makes a film, people take notice. For me, these are delicious, often unsettling – and sensitive – events. Critics adore his unique skill and have grown accustomed to his stylish shadings; audiences may be put off by his films’ strangeness, a tendency to excite […]
Various Industries Post-Independence: New African Cinema by Valérie K. Orlando
December 13, 2017
A Book Review by Cecilia A. Zoppelletto. Charting the recent film industry of an entire continent is an unimaginable task and, even if that could be done, the result would be an encyclopaedic creation of hundreds of pages satisfying merely the need for lists and facts. But is it actually […]
A Stilted, Flat Wonder Wheel
December 8, 2017
By Elias Savada. Woody Allen has gone dumpster diving. His new film, Wonder Wheel, is anything but wondrous. In fact, it stinks. The aging auteur may open his movie with a cloud-specked blue sky framing the aquamarine beach umbrellas and masses of New Yawkers absorbing the sun across every inch of […]
Melville at 100: Le samouraï from Criterion
By Tony Williams. Initially released in 2005, this new edition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s outstanding film has only one new feature to complement those that appeared earlier. They include the 2005 interviews with Rui Nogueira, editor of the classic interview book Melville on Melville (1971), and Ginette Vincendeau, author of the […]
Early Programming in the Midwest: Saving Brinton
By Jeremy Owen. Documentaries about cinema are today so numerous that they are close to a genre in their own right and, with a very definite cinema-centric subject matter Saving Brinton puts itself firmly into that canon. Co-directed by Iowa based film-makers Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne along with fellow […]
Double Vision: The Breadwinner
November 30, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. The power and purpose of storytelling is essential to The Breadwinner, the newly released animated adaptation of Deborah Ellis’ 2000 young-adult novel of the same name, directed by Nora Twomey and scripted by Anita Doron. For Kabul father Nurullah (voiced by Ali Badshah), stories are a way to […]
From Novel to Transformation – The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, Edited by Rosemary Roberts and Li Li
November 28, 2017
A Book Review by Tony Williams. On the surface, most of this edited collection of essays from Hong Kong University Press (2017) appears to have little to do with media save for the last section. But today, Film (and by implication Media) Studies has long passed the time when it had to […]
In Defiance of Hollywood – Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxpoitation, 1977-1986 by Keith Corson
A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. The film director’s traditional conflict between making an artistic statement and making a film that earns money is especially challenging if the director is black. Like any, these filmmakers have to cover significant costs and work within a budget. And because film is […]
Verity Less Lively: Flesh and Blood
By Dean Goldberg. There’s an often quoted line attributed to director Alfred Hitchcock that goes like this: “Drama is life with the boring parts cut out.” Flesh and Blood, a new film that turned heads at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, bounces Hitch’s statement on its end. Indeed, actor/director Mark […]